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Subject: The man looked like a cat: Michael Idov reviews Stalin in Russian
Satire, 1917-1991 by Karen L. Ryan (TNR)
... the mustached Stalin was incredibly easy to turn into either a cat
or a cockroach because of a linguistic quirk, one that Ryan knows and
acknowledges: in Russian, the word usy means "mustache" as well as
"whiskers" and "feelers." The human-mustache meaning is at the center of
that cluster, however, so both the cat and the cockroach, in the Russian
mind, are by default mustached. Reaching for Lacan to connect Stalin to
a cat through the latter's unknowable alterity is a classic case of
forest-for-the-trees hyperacademism. The man looked like a cat. Every
person living in his hell knew that.
http://www.tnr.com/book/review/gulag-humor
Gulag Humor
* Michael Idov
* February 12, 2010 | 12:00 am
Stalin in Russian Satire, 1917-1991 by Karen L. Ryan
MICHAEL IDOV on RUSSIAN SATIRES OF STALIN
The idea that Russia's many current woes stem from its incomplete
de-Stalinization is so widespread as to be banal. It is also correct.
Just two months ago, I stared agape at the newly restored name of Stalin
coiling around a neoclassical portico at the Kurskaya metro station in
Moscow. The name had its own security guard: look up at those six
letters for more than a few seconds, as I did, and he would saunter
closer. A few weeks earlier, Stalin had been leading a national poll for
Russia's "greatest name." After some careful counting and recounting, he
ended up in third place, still handily beating out Pushkin and
Dostoevsky.
As the current Russian administration's bizarre and revolting
ambivalence over Stalin's legacy bubbles up into the news and onto the
architecture, Karen L. Ryan's new study, Stalin in Russian Satire,
1917-1991 is certainly timely. It is a welcome reminder that the Soviet
people (a more correct title, given the dates, would be "Stalin in
Soviet Satire") did not uniformly adore or fear the tyrant; that,
indeed, a great deal of literature, popular song and oral lore were
devoted to ruthless mockery of him-even, incredibly, in the times when
one incautious dinner-party remark could mean a midnight arrest, a
forced confession, and decades in the camps.
Sadly, this well researched and imaginatively sourced book is also
rendered near-poisonous by a single but fundamental distortion that
informs every page. Ryan, an American professor of Slavic languages and
literatures, has found an original hook for her study: Russian
lampooning of Stalin, she argues, is not just the fatalistic gallows
humor of an oppressed populace with a long history of fatalism and
gallows. It is reflexive self-exoneration of the guilty collective mind,
a way of externalizing the oppressor. "By showing that Stalin could not
have been part of Russian culture," writes Ryan, "...satire often
functions to affirm the health and soundness of that culture." If Stalin
is alien, he is not I; and if he is not I, I bear no responsibility for
his reign. This is a valid point, of course-it is just not the only
point. By making it the centerpiece of the book, she succeeds in turning
the mockery of a tyrant-one of the bravest deeds available to an artist
living under tyranny-into an act of, well, cowardice.
Stalin in Russian Satire is organized, rather intriguingly, by literary
device as opposed to era or genre. The first chapter, "The Insanity
Defense," collars some of the work in which Stalin is depicted as a
raving madman, infecting the country with his delirium. The next and
most amusing chapter, "A Bestiary of Stalins," displays veiled
descriptions of the dictator as the titular critters in Kornei
Chukovsky's Aesopian children's poem "The Big Bad Cockroach" and Bulat
Okudzhava's 1966 song "The Black Tomcat." "Stalin in a Dress" deals with
perhaps the most usual and obvious way of denigrating a tyrant, "The
Monster Lurks Within" examines Stalin as a dragon and a steel bird, and
the final two chapters discuss Stalin's somewhat linked depictions as
the Devil and the undead.
The resulting mustached menagerie is almost overwhelming. Here is Stalin
thawing out from cryogenic sleep in 1974, swooping down from the skies
as a flying transvestite, fighting his own rebellious foot; if "the
sleep of reason produces monsters," per Goya's etching, these are the
nightmares that follow. The range of sources on which Ryan draws is
remarkable, from marquee names (Vladimir Nabokov, Aleksandr
Solzhenitsyn) to the figures relatively obscure in the West, such as Yuz
Aleshkovsky and songwriter Aleksandr Galich; the inclusion of Evgenii
Shvarts, a playwright of biting and brilliant allegories who easily
deserves Bulgakov-size fame, alone makes the book worth reading.
At the same time, Ryan is hobbled at every turn by her own high concept,
the sole prism through which she sees all satire of Stalin: his
manufactured "alterity," a postgrad term for otherness.
"Exclusion-casting Stalin as other in respect to the cultural self-is a
particular mechanism supported by Russia's essentially Manichaean
worldview," she asserts in the introduction, the first of many, many
iterations of the same thought. Ryan's toolkit is Lacanian, with dashes
of Tzvetan Todorov: she sees the Other everywhere, undertaking a great
deal of logical contortion in the process.
Watching Ryan strain to suit her goals is frankly uncomfortable and a
little embarrassing. Dissecting "The Cockroach," which is about an
imperious insect who terrorizes all woodland creatures too scared to
notice its puny size, the author seizes on the bouncy couplet "Volki ot
ispuga / Skushali drug druga" (The wolves from fear / Ate one another
up") and gives us this:
"Given that all of Chukovsky's animals are anthropomorphized, this
consumption is equivalent to cannibalism or anthropophagy, the eating of
like by like. Stalin-the-Cockroach's inciting the peaceful animals to
break this taboo enhances his alterity, for cannibalism is a feature
often associated with an exotic other."
Let's look past the author's academese, which verges on self-parody
(would that cannibalism ate anthropophagy); the assertion is nonsense at
its very root, because it switches subjects from the wolves to the
cockroach halfway through. Saddest of all, the cited couplet is in fact
a perfect, succinct satire of the Russians' behavior under Stalin-the
self-destructive culture of stukachestvo, or ratting out the neighbor;
the people were so afraid they indeed ate each other up. But this, of
course, directly contradicts Ryan's big thesis-it accepts and
internalizes blame exactly where she prefers to see deflection.
On page after page, Ryan negates her own terrific insights with her need
to make them fit a ridiculous framework. In a discussion of Okudzhava's
"The Black Tomcat," nominally about a cat holding court in a Moscow
yard, she smartly connects the song's vision of Stalin as a demonic
feline with an old Russian lubok (folk gravure) giving Peter the Great
the same treatment. Then she finds the line "Each person brings him
something / and thanks him," and her Lacanian alarms go off for the
thousandth time: "This act sounds very much like sacrifice and what is
offered up is left unspoken; sacrifice-especially human sacrifice-is
usually associated with an exotic other."
In Ryan's eyes, Russian satire of Stalin exists to address the "painful
question of guilt, complicity, and responsibility," and largely fails at
it. In this single-minded focus, the author appears to have forgotten
the basic mechanisms of her very subject. The first rule of satire,
everywhere, always, is that you work with what you've got. In the case
of Stalin, this meant a mustache, pockmarks, a withered left hand-a
handicap as unacknowledged and as well-known as FDR's polio-and, yes,
that thick Georgian accent. (Oddly, Ryan all but omits Osip Mandelstam's
famous "Stalin Epigram," the suicide bomb of a poem whose
characterization of the dictator as a "Kremlin highlander" certainly
plays into the exoticism motif). Put it this way: if Stalin were
grotesquely obese, the same lore would paint him as a whale,
hippopotamus or a dirigible. Or, as is the case with the protagonist in
another of Kornei Chukovsky's rhymed fables, a walking, hectoring
washtub. In addition, the mustached Stalin was incredibly easy to turn
into either a cat or a cockroach because of a linguistic quirk, one that
Ryan knows and acknowledges: in Russian, the word usy means "mustache"
as well as "whiskers" and "feelers." The human-mustache meaning is at
the center of that cluster, however, so both the cat and the cockroach,
in the Russian mind, are by default mustached. Reaching for Lacan to
connect Stalin to a cat through the latter's unknowable alterity is a
classic case of forest-for-the-trees hyperacademism. The man looked like
a cat. Every person living in his hell knew that.
Michael Idov is a contributing editor at New York Magazine and the
author of the novel Ground Up
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